Corsair Blog

The Corsair Force Series F40 solid-state drive is best way to bring your system into the 21^st century. Utilizing the SandForce® SF-1222 SSD Processor, and with a capacity of 40GB, the Force Series F40 delivers the performance enthusiasts demand without breaking the bank.

Optimizing your Force Series F40 SSD

There are a few simple things you can do to get the most out of any SSD. Most importantly when using a smaller drive, you want to save on disk space wherever possible. Outlined below are the steps we took to achieve maximum results without impacting performance.

Disable Hibernation

If your system isn't a laptop or netbook then you probably won't ever need hibernation. When hibernation is turned on, your system keeps a file on the root of your drive where it saves information about what you're currently doing on your computer. Since we're working on a desktop, you'll most likely either shut down your system completely or put it in sleep mode when you're not using it. Disabling hibernation is easily accomplished with a simple command line and will save you several GB's of space. On our F40 we found that disabling Hibernation saved us roughly 8GB of space (20%)!

Here are the steps we followed:

1. Click on the "Start" button (Window's logo icon in the lower left hand corner of your desktop) and type "command" into the search field
2. Right click on "Command Prompt" at the top of your search results and choose "Run as Administrator"
3. In the DOS window enter the following command: powercfg –h off
4. Close the command window and pat yourself on the back, hibernation is now disabled

Change your Page File settings

The primary purpose of your pagefile is to act as virtual memory. Microsoft® Windows 7 primarily uses it for a couple of things; first off it acts as a staging area for information the OS thinks it might need next. In addition, the page file acts as auxiliary main memory in case you don't have enough physical memory (DRAM). Finally, some applications are written to utilize the pagefile and may refuse to work correctly without one being present.

With so much system memory in today's computers, you might think that you could get away just turning off your pagefile. However, we have experimented with various pagefile settings and found that you get slightly better performance by relocating the pagefile to a storage drive, and believe this option is the best solution. Feel free to experiment with different settings; what works best on your system might be different, and you can always go back to an earlier setting if you like.

Here are the steps we followed in Windows 7 to change the pagefile settings:

1. Click on the Start button then right click on "My Computer" and choose "Properties"
2. In the left pane, click "Advanced" then click on "Settings" under "Performance"
3. Select the "Advanced" tab and click on "Change" in the "Virtual Memory" section
4. Uncheck the box at the top and select your SSD
5. Click on "No paging file" then click on "Set"
   • Ignore any warnings, we're simply relocating the pagefile
6. Select your secondary drive and click on "System managed size"
7. Click on "Set" then "OK"
8. Reboot your computer and confirm that everything is where it should be
   • The pagefile.sys is a system file so you won't be able to see it until you've changed your file view properties

A note on game and program files

While installing and running your games and programs on your SSD will be quickest, you'll want to determine on a case by case basis which ones are important enough to reside on your SSD. Programs such as Outlook rely on a database file and really benefit from the increased I/O of an SSD while most other programs aren't going to see the same level of benefit. Today's games are usually 5GB or more in size (Starcraft II takes 10.5GB!) so you're not going to be able to install many games on your boot drive at the same time. Since we aren't worried about fragmenting an SSD, you're safe to install the game on your SSD while you're actively playing it then move it over to your storage drive once you're not playing it so frequently.

Turn off indexing

Indexing is a trick Windows uses to speed up the search for information on your hard drive. This helps on rotating media (HDD's) but doesn't provide any benefit on an SSD, and only increases CPU overhead.

Here are the steps we followed to turn it off:

1. Click on the "Start" button and type "services" into the search field then click on the "Services" program in the results field
2. Double-click on "Windows Search" (tip: sort by name)
3. Change "Startup type" to "Disabled" and click on "Stop" to turn off the service currently running

Modify Windows System Restore

While you could turn this function off entirely, we feel that it's worth keeping around. After all, as good as Windows 7 is, it still occasionally encounters problems, and being able to roll back your OS to an earlier version could save you the headache of having to reinstall everything from scratch. By default, System Restore will reserve between three and five percent of your drive, which means that your system is setting aside at least 1GB.

According to Microsoft you'll need to allow the system to reserve at least 300MB (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/How-much-disk-space-does-System-Restore-require). Fortunately, you control the percentage of reserved space with a slider bar, so it's impossible to go below that barrier.

Here are the steps we followed to modify System Restore:

1. Click on the Start button then right click on "My Computer" and choose "Properties"
2. In the left pane, click "System protection"
3. Under "Protection Settings", click on your SSD then click "Configure"
4. Under "Disk Space Usage" move the slider all the way to the left

Completed Installation

If you followed our suggestions for dealing with the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files you'll find that a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installation will weigh in right at about 10.4GB. And once you've installed Outlook 2010 (all files and programs run from disk) you'll be left with plenty of room to enjoy the latest games on your new SSD without any compromises.

Finall tally: 13.2GB for a full Windows and Office install, leaving you with 23.9GB of super-fast SSD to get your game on!